23 January 2007
At the linux.conf.au Open Day, I glimpsed a demonstration of a computer running a game called ‘OpenArena’. OpenArena is an open source clone of the game Quake III: Arena, and built with the same engine, which was open-sourced in 2005.
Graphics are not too bad, although they appear to be a cheap ripoff of Q3A. A free ripoff. In fact, that’s the whole point. It’s basically designed to be an open-source equivalent of Q3A and I don’t think they’ve done too bad a job.
It’s so not too bad a job [sic] that Urban Terror even runs on OpenArena. Urban Terror is a total conversion mod for Quake III: Arena, designed as a realism shooter. Apart from the occasional missing texture in a limited number of maps, the mod runs fine in OpenArena. At the time of writing, there was only one Internet game server running Urban Terror on OpenArena.
Tagged: gaming, lca2007, Linux | 2 Comments »
19 January 2007
Today, I saw a particularly interesting presentation at linux.conf.au called “burning cpu and battery on the gnome desktop”. In the talk, Ryan discussed a couple of common ways Linux applications waste CPU cycles.
The most common way an application can do this is by polling when unnecessary. Ryan Lortie gave several examples of applications that do this. One prominent example on most GNOME desktops is that the gnome-panel process polls the Recent Documents file every second. Ryan also reported that the Linux kernel version 2.6.21 will be ‘tickless’ which will improve battery life.
Ryan demonstrated finding these problems in applications with strace and gdb. That part went in one ear and out the other, as I have absolutely no familiarity with debugging applications, but it was very interesting to watch, regardless.
Tagged: hardware, lca2007, Linux | No Comments »
16 January 2007
One particular piece of software demoed yesterday was called ‘Conduit‘. It’s an interesting synchronisation program for GNOME, and allows you to synchronise a ‘Source’ into a ‘Sink’.
I’m running version 0.2 on this Ubuntu-based laptop (couldn’t figure out getting it to run from SVN), but the version demoed at the miniconf was slightly short of 0.3 and had a few more interesting ways to sink.
Even though I was only running version 0.2, I managed to get an interesting sync going, including downloading all my starred Gmail emails into a folder, and importing all my Tomboy notes into Gmail. The new version apparently will feature iPod support as well.
I think it’s a very exciting piece of software that will become another killer app for GNOME.
Tagged: gnome, lca2007, Linux | 1 Comment »
14 January 2007
Tomorrow is linux.conf.au, which I’ll be attending. I’ll be blogging while I’m there, as apparently there’s WiFi internet access.
Tagged: lca2007 | No Comments »
11 January 2007
According to this Slashdot post (which I was linked to via the awesome Planet Ubuntu), Acer has been shipping an ActiveX control with their laptops since 1998. Not just any ActiveX control, though. One that allows you to execute any program on the hard disk, and is a fully trusted ActiveX control, so it’ll be run automatically without prompts.
Scary stuff. I might run the exploit on my blog according to these comments to automatically disable the ActiveX control. 
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